Lani Parker

Sideways Times is a UK based podcast, in which we talk about the politics of disability, disability justice, struggles against ableism, white supremacy, capitalism and heteropatriarchy. Through this podcast, I hope to have many conversations which broaden, deepen and challenge our understandings of how we work against ableism and how this connects to other struggles.

Sideways Times aims to connect theory and practice and contribute towards a culture of learning and creative thinking within our movements as a collaborative space that encourages deep and critical thinking and creativity, and we are more concerned with the exchange of ideas and knowledge than we are with ascribing to labels or fixed political perspectives.

As Jorge and Patricia lay-out in their intentions for this edition, looking at disability allows us to think about something which is part of everyone’s life. This edition follows a long tradition of theorising from experience and underlines the importance of doing that, as reflected in the title ‘The Voice of Many’. The conversations in this issue are part of an ongoing struggle to create space for marginalised people to talk about their experiences and to build a politics which is truly liberatory.

Often when I do Disability Equality Training I talk to non-disabled people about what disability is and the impact of ableism. People are often surprised about the wide range of impairments and experiences which would classify someone as disabled. There is a realisation that “my cousin”, “my wife”, “my brother” would be classified as disabled. Sometimes we then go on to talk about the classification system and how inadequate it is, how it is used to categorise people as genuine and not genuine, deserving and undeserving.

We might also then talk about the roots of human classification and how these stem from white supremacist assumptions about who is human and who is not. These racialised classifications have material effects and link into ableist categorisations that put conditions on whose lives are valued and supported.

Towards the end of the discussion, I can sense a realisation of human connection but also of the enormity of the task at hand.

A common response is “disability is a universal human experience; everybody should be treated equally”.

But for me, this raises more questions than it answers:

1. Who is deciding on what is equal treatment?
2. Is equal treatment all we want?
3. What about the systems we need to build to ensure everyone is safe, can thrive and not be perceived as “too much”?
4. What about transforming society?
5. As people with impairments, long-term health conditions, who experience mental distress and/or are neurodivergent we all have different experiences, how our bodies are racialised and gendered also has an impact on these experiences, which cannot be separated from each other?

The dominant (white) disability movement has tried to craft an identity which erases the power dynamics at play within the constructions of ableism. This publication forms part of a long strand of intersectional theorising within disability studies and social movements.

In 1992 Nasa Begum, writing in Feminist Review, wrote about how the experiences of black disabled women were not taken seriously by the feminist movement. In 2005 Ozzy Stuart, acknowledging the debt to feminists of colour, wrote about the tendency of the white-dominated movement and the social model to erase the effects of racism and the differing experiences of disabled people of colour. Talking from his own experience as a black man, Stuart writes about the “laws removing physical barriers might get me into buildings but once inside I will remain invisible” (Stuart, p.178).

More recently Michelle Daly wrote a thank you letter to disabled women of colour, acknowledging some of the work that had gone before. I have learnt (and continue to learn) from Daly, Stuart, Begum, and many other disabled people of colour, about the many ways in which racism and ableism interlock. This includes the importance of white disabled people being vigilant in resisting the ways our whiteness protects us.

As a white person born with an impairment I am often seen as innocent, special and in need of protection, but also to be kept separate in some ways, adding up to something like exceptionalism. So these two identities and experiences – of being white and disabled – twist together. This means that my place within the disability movement has always been assumed. My impairment (visible and more or less stable), my mostly middle-class background, education, secure citizenship all make me appear “genuine” and “deserving”.

Consequently, the dominant disability movement, reflecting wider society, has fought for my needs. But what about those whose experiences and needs are not seen as acceptable, legitimate or deserving?

What differences are being erased?

Recognising difference is important, but for me, this is really about what we fight for and how we fight for each other’s needs and connect. For example, as Rebekah Ubuntu’s contribution demonstrates, if it is not safe enough for somebody to identify as disabled, then this should not be the aim. Instead, we should aim for us to build a world together where everyone is safe enough, full stop.

The title ‘The Voice of Many’ is an acknowledgement that we cannot build disability politics through the erasure of difference but that we need to build connections within difference. Serena Katt’s review of Khairani Barokka’s play points out the impossibility of truly knowing another human’s experiences, and so for me, part of the call to action is not to know but to connect in the face of isolation, and to create spaces to talk and be in as much safety as possible, as well as doing the hard work of building coalitions.

Life is made up of big and small acts; it may be obvious to say but yet it is important to acknowledge that those acts are made through relationships and the different connections we make with people. What is key is whether those relationships and those people are honoured and valued. For example, Annabel Crowley’s contribution details the skill of her work and how she holds people’s stories or bears witness to them. This makes me think about how important our stories are and how skilled the work of supporting and fighting for each other is and how our experiences give us those skills. In conversation, Elora Kadir talks about the value of her relationships with the Facilities Assistants in Central St Martins and how these services are devalued by the institution.

Disability politics is about how we value ourselves and our relationships, building cultures of care in the face of segmentation and oppression.

In this society, certain types of labour are valued and others are undervalued. For example, those who do the work of producing and reproducing infrastructures of care, those who work to make sure that things run smoothly (from people who collect the rubbish to people who clean and set up rooms in our universities) are all under-recognised and under-paid. What would the world be like if this type of labour was truly honoured? If people knew that they were more than their work and that they are amazing just because they live?

Building cultures of care means focusing on ways we care for each other and recognising the different types of and extent of the labour we are expected and/or forced to do. For example, when Audre Lorde said that caring for herself was ‘self-preservation’ as well as ‘an act of political warfare’, she was speaking in relation to black women in particular, and the realities of an anti-black world. The way that this quote gets taken up and appropriated to suggest that self-care is an equally radical and political act for anyone, including white people, detaches Lorde’s words from the struggle of anti-black racism. This reminds me that I will often need to explicitly de-prioritise my own comfort (sometimes confused with self-care) and support the self-care of others.

It seems to me that access and cultures of care are inextricably linked together because they are both about how we create spaces to be together to talk about the things that matter (perhaps often things that don’t get talked about), to learn to listen to each other and to create relationships where we are valued, in order to change the dynamics of the society we live in. As Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha demonstrates in her book Care Work, accessible networks of care are not easy to build, as they do not automatically materialise from perceived shared experiences. Maybe sometimes we feel there is fragmentation, and it is important to work through the traumas we have faced in order to stay connected in a world that constantly asks that people split off from each other and ourselves.

So those connections we make, where we can talk about subjects that are not easy or are not allowed, are part of counteracting isolation and understanding that as individual people we are whole and do not need curing. That experiences of illness and chronic pain can objectify and fragment us, constantly reinforcing to us the idea that we are broken. But Vilissa Thompson’s piece about Queen Sugar underlines the importance of seeing disabled black women as ‘whole’ and not giving in to the trope that disabled people are broken.

We are all part of webs of change and we need to build ways to care and support each other, which pull us together without erasing difference. If we take as a premise that none of us is broken and that the task is to build a world where it is possible for everybody to thrive, this takes us beyond inclusion into this society and into the realm of building another way of living, one which is focused on caring for each other and allowing us to be fully whole.